[Secondary Proposal] API3 DAO UX/UI Team Proposal #1, Sep-Nov

ipfs: https://lavender-proposed-aardwolf-228.mypinata.cloud/ipfs/QmRi6vwW7qQpxoiSyGBpQXdNJQFW5xFKFxR51mi3CkxkAh

API3 DAO UX Team Proposal

Period: 1 Sep 2023 - 31 Nov 2023 (3 months)
Amount: 71,724.40 USDC

Destination: Gnosis Safe (Multi-sig wallet)
Address: 0xB5acD4bAf54142ADDfC944bf4F35F54B259bDe90
Signers: ⅔ Multi-sig
Tamara: 0x8282D2E4e853b178fAFd13F7FcA997EaaA7030B9
Entrecasa: 0xD48740ebF2f490536426bbcc0e8B7180E17CF531
Harsha: 0x418A68aB1e7D4D251F7Ecdf40FD71Fb1ca2A52e9

Scope

The focus of this team will be various elements that contribute to strong user experience and
product design. Although now in a separate proposal, each member of this team has
previously contributed in this capacity under the core technical team. A separate proposal
allows us to lighten the core technical team while scaling our own efforts to strengthen the
current UX, UI, and supporting resources. We’ll focus on 3 main aspects:

  1. Research & Testing
    Research and testing are the foundation of successful products. In the past, we
    conducted user interviews to create a few user personas around groups in the Web3
    space but feel those efforts need to be scaled and more in-depth research needs to
    be completed more often to give us a better understanding of the people we’re
    aiming to help with our ecosystem. Aside from interviews for user personas, we will
    be able to complete any research requests received from other teams and continue
    to carry out the necessary usability testing for the various API3 sites and products.
    Another aspect of research is sourcing quality responses from people that match our
    criteria. In the past this has proven difficult, so we would like to work on creating our
    own panel that will allow us to have a faster turnaround time for the research.
    Last but not least, we’ve found it difficult to collect feedback from the communities
    and will work towards supporting more ways to collect feedback while also creating a
    system to track queries from our community that will provide us with insight on areas
    for improvement.

  2. Analytics
    The data we currently have is not easily accessible by all of the teams, nor do they
    have time to consistently organize and create reports. We aim to organize the
    platforms we already use, create consistent reports for teams that would benefit, and
    further integrate google analytics with our products’ user flows. In addition to this, we
    will start working towards improved SEO. Our goal is to share valuable insights from
    our metrics.

  3. UX/UI
    Since API3 started, we have been responsible for working with product owners to
    visualize many projects (including the API3 Market, DAO UI, and ChainAPI) within
    API3 from lo-fi wireframes to polished, professional designs handed off to the
    developers. We don’t expect anything to change on this front and will continue to
    work closely with the technical teams.
    In the spirit of a DAO, we’d also like to create a public design system that will be
    used to keep our UX, UI, and branding consistent throughout the ecosystem. This
    system will include rules around how to use icons, typography, graphics, and other
    elements while staying within brand guidelines. It will also house all necessary
    documentation, such as brand guidelines, and should serve as the source of truth for
    the acceptable ways to use different elements. In addition, it will need a section
    dedicated to different templates needed by other teams for their online and physical
    presence. Currently, we don’t have any easy way to collaborate on our design rules
    and standards. Creating the design system described will allow us to work more
    collaboratively with other contractors and give other teams more confidence to use
    the components correctly. The system will be moderated and maintained by this
    team.

Deliverables
Most of the deliverables in the past are confidential, as they are research reports used to
educate product decisions and designs of features not yet released to the public. However,
the design system mentioned in this proposal will be published and maintained publicly, and
any research and analytics that are not deemed confidential will also be shared at the end of
the cycle.

Budget

image

Contractors
Visual design will continue to be completed by Entrecasa with an allocated 7,000 USDC/month and 6,000 USDC for external firms as needed.

Research Compensation
Research expenses include paying recruitment firms to recruit research participants as well
as compensation for the research participants.

Subscriptions
2,500 USDC is allocated to cover all software and subscriptions the team needs.

Headroom
An extra 10% headroom is being requested, with any unspent amount being carried over to
the next cycle.

4 Likes

API3 DAO UX/UI Team Proposal Closing Report

The proposal was initially created to continue contributing to a strong user experience and product design, in addition to bolstering our design language, visual identity, research, and data collection. Significant strides were made in each area with the following deliverables:

Graphics

  • To increase consistency between graphics and faster turnaround times, an internal process was established to make and receive requests for graphics.
  • Templates were also created for different types of announcements across social media to not just decrease turnaround time, but also visual consistency.
  • Produced over 60 graphics and several animations that spanned X, events, merch, and miscellaneous needs
  • Some highlights from the graphics:

    The $GNS/USD price feed is now available on the API3 Market, paving the way to build secure DeFi markets around @GainsNetwork_io's native token.

    Start using this new data feed to build on-chain products across 16 blockchains today. pic.twitter.com/E24emivQv8

    — API3 (@API3DAO) November 30, 2023

    We heard you loved our hoodies!

    We’re gonna have some more tomorrow starting at 10:00am. First come, first served! 🐈

    (PS: we ran out within 2 hours today.) #feedthecats pic.twitter.com/oGyf3nq2Y4

    — API3 (@API3DAO) November 14, 2023

    API3's Quantum RNG oracle is now live on @0xMantle as a public good!

    QRNG enables developers to access truly random numbers on-chain, enabling a variety of new dApp use-cases on Mantle.

    🧵1/4 pic.twitter.com/6lLhSthPTZ

    — API3 (@API3DAO) September 20, 2023

UX/UI

  • After the re-design of api3.org, we expanded the new brand to be usable on our other products. This allowed us to redesign API3 Market and https://ecosystem.api3.org/
  • Created the lo-fidelity mockups for the next version of the API3 Market
  • Entrecasa aided https://nodary.io/ with implementation of their new brand and QA revisions
  • Zeroheight was used to create a hub for design resources.
  • As part of the design system we are introducing design tokens and are currently in the process of testing their usage before fully implementing. Once completed, they will be visible and documented here: API3 Assets
  • A new media kit was also created API3 Assets

Research & Analytics

  • A study was conducted to document behavior around people discovering and using data feeds. This study was done in parallel with documenting what our current users experience while searching for data feeds and their journey through the API3 Market. From this, we were also able to create user personas and journey maps to reference to improve the experience for API3 Market visitors.
  • The team started to look for ways to improve hackathon and API3 documentation through surveys sent out to hackathon participants.
  • Google Analytics was updated to create more detailed events for the API3 Market and documentation to better find pain points and ways to improve both sites.

What’s next?

Rather than creating another cycle for this proposal, we will be moving to the Mission 1B20N24 proposal. During this time, we will continue working on the above initiatives to improve and maintain graphics, user experience, research, and analytics. At the time of writing this summary, we are waiting on the last of the invoices and will return excess funds to the DAO as soon as payments are completed.

Remaining funds were returned to the DAO: https://etherscan.io/tx/0x7965438e4bafd3566ba3d05a1d3c9c89e6e1ac0f03762edbe27785e3e9332728